Home / Analyze Your Economy / Getting Ready to use the... / CEA Tools - the Quick Guide

CEA Tools - the Quick Guide

Begin Using the CEA Tools

When you click on the link to the CEA Tools, you will see a page with two main sections: on the left is a box with tabs marked Steps 1 through 5, and on the right is a “navigational” map showing the province of Ontario with the boundaries showing for eleven economic regions.

To complete an analysis, you move sequentially through the five steps, making choices at each step that reflect the geographic area and type of analysis that interests you.

Step One: Geography Type

Lets you choose one of three types of geography
- Census Sub-Division: towns, townships, cities, reserves
- Census Division: counties, regional municipalities, districts and some large cities (e.g., Hamilton, Ottawa)
- Economic Region

Step Two: Type of Analysis

Select from six analytical methods
- Competitive Advantage Analysis assesses how local industries have grown or declined compared to the rest of Ontario, and measures how specialized your community is in different sectors. It classifies local industries according to their potential for growth.
- Labour Flow Analysis compares employment by sector at local establishments with employment held by local residents, to identify the level of "net export" or "net import" of labour. It also measures the relative concentration of labour in different sectors, as indicated by location quotients.
- Business Sector Analysis identifies the number of businesses in a specific sector located in each municipality in Ontario. It provides a relative measure of "business concentration" to identify communities with a relatively high number of businesses in the sector, based on the population size or the mix of sectors located in each community.
- Community Business Profile presents the number of businesses in each sector that are located in your community. It also provides values for "business concentration" to help identify the sectors for which your community has a relative specialization.
- Socio-Economic Indicators produces maps displaying the levels by municipality for various "indicators", which reflect socio-economic conditions. It uses 2001 and 2006 Census data and divides the indicators into two groups - "Housing, Income and Rurality", and "Employment, Education and Age". The maps allow comparison of your community with others according to such measures as median income and average value of dwellings.

Step Three: Industry/Year

This step lets you choose parameters for the type of analysis selected in Step 2. The options available here depend on the type of analysis, which is also dependent on the type of geography chosen at Step 1. The types of parameters available include the industry/sector, level of industry, year or time frame, and (if "Socio-Economic Indicators" was chosen at Step 2) the specific indicator for the analysis. This gets a bit complicated, but will make sense once you have worked through the steps a few times!

Step Four: Geography

Lets you select a specific community or region from a pick list At this point you can "zoom" the map to the selected community. You can then "zoom out" or "pan" the map to adjust the area displayed. The area shown in the navigation map will be the area shown in map reports at Step 5.

Step Five: Report

The final step in the analysis is to choose the type and format for your analysis reports. Options will vary depending on the type of analysis and industry chosen in Step 3. This is where you can choose to generate a map and/or tabular report/chart, as well as the format for tabular reports (html, Excel, XML, CSV). You may also have the option to choose comparison communities.